Superheroes allow us to believe in the possibility that humans—not gods or demons—can control the world. Blessed with extraordinary abilities, superheroes explain how the misfit can rise up and save us all from destruction. How many hours do children spend trying to bend a spoon with their minds, communicate telepathically with a kindred spirit or urge their bodies to levitate even a few inches off the ground? This desire for some supernatural agency is the reason comic books make such seductive film adaptations: We love the notion that a human outcast could wake up one day and walk through walls or fly over them. The seamless magic of editing makes anything seem possible.
But it all would have stayed a fantasy if one man hadn’t stopped daydreaming and figured out a way to manipulate his body into something almost superhuman.
As a dispossessed teenager in a working-class suburb of Paris, Frenchman David Belle invented parkour (pronounced par-CORE), a way of moving with the purpose of findng the most efficient way of crossing a landscape, usually an urban one, by adapting to obstacles without hesitation or disruption to the intended path. Many of the movements—vaulting, leaping, climbing, shimmying—resemble those of a four-legged animal or a monkey leaping through branches. Practitioners develop a quiet, Zen-like respect for the harmony between body and environment.
These original “traceurs,” as practitioners are called, were led by Belle, the restless son of a heroic French military firefighter, and Sebastian Foucan, a French-born boy with Caribbean roots who would go on to found parkour’s flashier cousin, Freerunning. You may know Foucan as the villain Mollaka, who is chased through Madagascar by Daniel Craig’s James Bond in the first scene of Casino Royale. Belle stars in his own action film, District B13, that has some of the most breathtaking action sequences, all derived from parkour, ever filmed.
The phenomenon has spread virally through the web, inspiring thousands around the world, including a growing number in New York City, to teach themselves the deceptively effortless-looking moves. Seeing is understanding: Parkour combines extreme athleticism with an elegiac grace that—like ballet, gymnastics, breakdancing— inspires a perplexing rush of hope. We are doomed to wake up from our flying dreams. But through rigorous training and dedication, perhaps we may be able to transform ourselves into superheroes—or back into the animals we’ve forgotten we once were.
Pictured are Exo, Quietdude (aka Basilio Montilla), Dominic and Pyro (aka Michael Araujo).
See more photos at derinthorpe.com/parkour/
